Future companion robots

You'd think they'd be less creepy, right?

But then I remembered: Japan.

Anyway, me struggling, to write a spoiler-free Moon review:

For such a slow-moving film, it’s surprisingly difficult to discuss more than ten minutes of Moon without spoiling something major. Anything I can in good conscience reveal to you is already apparent from the trailer: Sam Rockwell plays a glorified custodian who maintains a mining outpost on the far side of the moon. At the tail end of his three-year contract, and with the HAL-inspired computer Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) as his only companion, he’s beginning to go a little batty.

As the film’s tagline so vaguely declares, it is under these strange conditions that Rockwell comes to ‘find himself’. This turn of events (less introspective than, well…literal) sets in motion a plot compellingly mysterious, and of which I dare not speak further. Yet the ‘reveals’ are never the focus, and in many respects the mystery serves only as a set-up. Director (and progeny of David Bowie) Duncan Jones surely includes a fair share of twists and space oddities, but he is always more interested in creating a thoughtful science fiction mood piece.

Moon is essentially a one-man show, so Sam Rockwell haters need not apply. He does an admirable job, however, considering what’s asked of him. It’s certainly a challenging role—on top of being in literally every scene, Rockwell is required to play variations of the same character, which fluctuate depending on what stage of stir-crazy he’s entered. Perhaps even more importantly, the film often avoids explication, especially in terms of Rockwell, who doesn’t really have anyone else to explain himself to. Instead his character internalizes much of what happens, and Rockwell must present his development through the subtleties of his performance, rather than long lines of dialogue. And more challenging yet, both Rockwell and his robot pal Gerty are at the centre of a crisis of identity, and he must wrestle with the themes and underlying questions of the film, despite that these are never quite made explicit (until, perhaps, the film’s final scene). The result is something quiet and reflective, calling to mind the smarter brand of sci-fi that uses the genre as more than a mere setting for explosions and shape-shifting robots.

In its headiest moments, science fiction provides a medium to explore questions of what it means to be human in the face of advancing technology. Threads of this theme can be found in everything from Frankenstein to the recently completed Battlestar Galactica series, both of which serve, to some extent, as statements on humankind’s tumultuous history with its own creations. In Galactica’s finale, a character reflects on such a history (including the show’s central war with artificial intelligence), commenting that, “our brains have always outraced our hearts.”

In perhaps an even more direct manner, Moon is also about our complicated relationship with technology and the ethical dilemmas approaching us. It is interesting that Rockwell’s facility mines Helium-3 from the surface of the moon, an element which—based on a little bit of real-life research in fusion—has come to replace conventional fossil fuels and lead the world into a new eco-friendly era. It’s the dream scenario: the damage caused by technological advancement has been solved by better technology. But here, as in Galactica, minds outrace hearts, and with one ethical dilemma solved several others rise to take its place.

This is not to say that Moon is a film for technophobes, nor is it the classic story of humankind falling victim to its own creations. The danger is not so much technology as the way in which it is put to use. To this end Jones walks the fine and difficult line of making Gerty a character both sympathetic and threatening. Spacey often overdoes the creepy monotone voice (which may say a lot about Spacey’s work in general, considering Gerty more-or-less sounds like Kevin Spacey), but his performance is effective enough to craft Gerty as a send-up and response to HAL.

The problem Moon addresses is not robots or science or any of the machinations of the human imagination. The lasting truth that our technology is always outracing our moral reasoning is not the fault of technology but rather our own technological view of the world. Through developments such as Helium-3, we may fix certain problems, or repair errors in the machinery, but what really matters is that we remain stuck viewing our world and our handiwork merely in terms of what can be weighed, measured, and, most importantly, put to use. As much as this is evident in our management of natural resources, in Moon we see it in the treatment of people, and even in the treatment of a creepy computer program voiced by Kevin Spacey.